Anthropic's revenue has outpaced OpenAI, and it is sprinting toward the largest IPO in history.

For OpenAI, its strong rival Anthropic is no longer a mere "chaser".

Recently, Anthropic informed potential investors that its revenue in the second quarter increased by at least 14 times year-on-year. Relevant documents show that Anthropic's preliminary revenue in its most recent full quarter exceeded 11.5 billion US dollars, compared with 787 million US dollars in the same period of 2025 and 4.73 billion US dollars in the first quarter of this year, with a quarter-on-quarter increase of over 140%.

In addition, the documents also show that the company recorded an adjusted operating profit of 559 million US dollars for the first time in the second quarter, achieving profitability at the operational level. Calculated on this basis, Anthropic's latest annualized revenue run rate has exceeded 46 billion US dollars.

On August 18, a person familiar with the matter said that Anthropic's annualized revenue calculated based on current business performance is expected to exceed 65 billion US dollars, rising more than six times from the level at the end of last year.

In contrast, OpenAI's revenue in the second quarter was 6.7 billion US dollars, a quarter-on-quarter increase of only 18% compared with 5.7 billion US dollars in the first quarter. Its growth rate slowed down significantly, and its operating loss continued to expand in the same period, failing to turn to profitability. Its annualized revenue in 2026 is expected to exceed 40 billion US dollars, doubling its 2025 revenue.

While one side achieved quarterly profitability, the other side suffered high losses. The two report cards with diverging trends indicate that the business models of the two leading AI companies have shown substantial differentiation.

Some institutional analysts believe that the widening revenue gap between the two is mainly due to the change of choices brought by the actual usage cost of enterprise customers. Although the marked price of a single call of Anthropic's flagship model is not low, it has higher task completion accuracy, which reduces repeated calls and manual review, so the actual comprehensive usage cost for enterprises is more advantageous.

01

All along, Anthropic has concentrated its resources on enterprise development scenarios. Its Claude Code programming tool has experienced explosive growth, firmly grasping the needs of developers and technology-based enterprises, and the enterprise-side business contributes the vast majority of incremental revenue. OpenAI, on the other hand, has built a huge consumer base relying on ChatGPT, but the growth of consumer subscriptions has peaked, and the expansion speed of its enterprise business is slower than that of its rival.

Moreover, Anthropic attaches more importance to revenue quality and gross profit margin, prioritizing the development of enterprise tool products that can be monetized quickly. OpenAI maintains a strategy of comprehensive investment in large models and multiple product lines, with a huge scale of investment in computing power infrastructure. For every dollar of revenue generated, it has to bear high hardware and reasoning costs.

In April this year, according to reports from multiple media outlets, OpenAI failed to meet its monthly sales targets for several months, and ChatGPT failed to achieve the goal of 1 billion weekly active users by the end of 2025. Due to the rising popularity of Google's Gemini last year, the churn rate of ChatGPT's subscribers still poses a challenge.

Sarah Friar, OpenAI's Chief Financial Officer, also expressed concerns in conversations with other company executives that if OpenAI's sales do not grow fast enough, it may not be able to afford future computing power demands.

While the performance pattern is changing, both companies are stepping up preparations for IPOs, hoping to use public market funds to support future computing power and R&D investment. Anthropic has submitted a confidential S-1 prospectus to the U.S. SEC in June this year, with Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase acting as underwriters, targeting an IPO window between September and October this year.

Some investors have given Anthropic a maximum valuation expectation of 2 trillion US dollars. If this target is finally fulfilled, Anthropic will surpass SpaceX's previous IPO valuation record of 1.77 trillion US dollars, becoming the largest IPO in history. Wall Street is looking further into the future than usual to value this artificial intelligence company, and its valuation is based on the revenue the company may generate two years later.

According to two people familiar with the company's financial situation, Anthropic expects its revenue to reach about 190 billion to 200 billion US dollars in 2028, a figure that has not been disclosed before.

Anthropic also plans to grant shares with extra voting rights to CEO Dario Amodei and other co-founders, a move that is also preparing for the company's listing on Wall Street. This ownership structure is relatively common in the technology industry, aiming to ensure that founders have greater say in the company's development direction. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and others also hold super-voting shares.

The pace of OpenAI's IPO is relatively unclear. On local time June 8, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told employees that OpenAI is expected to go public "within the next year". Altman said the actual timing may be earlier or later, but "filing now will give us more flexibility". On the same day, OpenAI announced that it has confidentially submitted a draft S-1 for its IPO to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

However, as OpenAI's losses continue to expand, many investors have doubts about the company's IPO valuation. Fidelity Securities wrote in a recent report that OpenAI's anchor valuation is "closer to 700 billion to 800 billion US dollars, rather than 1 trillion US dollars".

02

Both companies are competing to lay out the enterprise AI track.

On May 4, Anthropic and OpenAI announced large-scale enterprise AI joint venture projects on almost the same day. OpenAI launched "The Deployment Company", cooperating with TPG, Bain Capital, SoftBank and other institutions to build a 100-billion-US-dollar-level enterprise AI deployment platform, providing customized AI implementation services for large groups. Anthropic, on the other hand, joined forces with Blackstone and Goldman Sachs to set up a 1.5-billion-US-dollar enterprise AI service joint venture, focusing on the mass implementation of the Claude model for medium-sized enterprises to expand its own customer base.

Even with its revenue overtaking that of OpenAI, Anthropic still faces multiple practical challenges. Its profitability is a phased result of a single quarter. Rising computing power costs, the impact of open-source large models, and tightening budgets of enterprise customers may all erode its profit margin. High dependence on enterprise customers also means that once downstream enterprises cut their AI budgets, revenue growth will quickly come under pressure. For OpenAI, the biggest challenge is how to balance growth, losses and capital market expectations.

Many industry investors believe that quarterly revenue only represents the present, and the real test is whether after listing, the two companies can continuously prove to the market that cutting-edge artificial intelligence can become a long-term and healthy business.

This article is from the WeChat official account "JIEMIAN News", written by Song Jiannan, and authorized for release by 36Kr.